Carnival Dream Day 5

Day 5 of our fantastic voyage was a stop in Belize City, Belize. We were all really looking forward to this port, and were hugely disappointed. I've never understood how people complain about cruise stops, because I couldn't imagine a tropical place that a cruise ship would deem fit enough to make it a stop being that bad. We didn't book an excursion at this stop, and planned on walking to or taking a cab to a nearby beach and seeing if they had jetski rentals or parasailing. Boy were we wrong... the night before we were watching my favorite cruise director ever.. Butch Begovech on the tv in our stateroom, and he was talking about Belize and how it was the one port you should definitely book an excursion in as it doesn't have any beaches except for a sandbar, and that you don't want to leave the port area as it's not appealing to the eye at all and can be dangerous. We were disappointed that our beach day wasn't going to be, but still wanted to take the tender boat over to shore and at least see Belize. This is where the day started off bad...

Ships cannot dock at a pier in Belize because of the reef, so they drop anchor a few miles off the coast and all the passengers are tendered to shore. No big deal... I had to do this on a cruise that stopped in the Cayman Islands, and H has done this before on the private islands in the Bahamas. Well, it turned into a big deal, because when we decided to join all the other non-excursion passengers in the lounge where they told us all to meet around 11:00am, they just released us all to Deck 0 and there were no tender boats available. Talk about an angry crowd packed in like sardines! One guy in the crowd even proceeded to start flipping out on the poor girl trying to calm down the crowd saying a tender ship was on it's way and to please stand behind the line. In all honesty, we waited a good 45 minutes in a very uncomfortable situation. And it wasn't worth the wait at all. When we arrived at Belize City, the water was nasty and not that picturesque blue/green water of the Caribbean, and there was only a tiny strip of shops that all appeared to be very rundown. Needless to say, this was the first and only port I've ever walked around for a little bit, picked up a few quick souvenirs, and went right back to the ship. And let me tell you I have never seen so many people on a ship during a day it's in port somewhere. It seemed like most people had the same type of experience as us, and preferred to be on the boat for the remainder of our time in the port of Belize. We went and got lunch, and spent the rest of the afternoon at the pool.

A view of our ship as we pulled away on the tender boat

Pulling up to Belize on the tender boat

Me and H during our short stop in Belize

Back on the ship we all ordered the drink of the day "Bahama Mama" and enjoyed them in the pool

We had more fun on the ship than in our port of call that day

Towel animal of the day! I thought it was a dinosaur, H disagreed :-P

That evening, was the deck party up at the main pool where there was live music, a laser show, and team spirit of the red, white, and blue teams that are broken down by which deck you're staying on. We were on deck 7 and a part of the white team. Our cruise director got everyone all riled up and started leading off the conga lines.. the team with the longest conga line won for that night. The blue team won (booooo), but that's ok because on the last night the white team was announced as the winners for the week! Wooty woot! 

Using our glowsticks as microphones.. yeah we're huge dorks